Marking World Children’s Day, the Ministry of Education and the Palestinian Prisoner Society (PPS) said today in two separate statements that Israel killed 15 Palestinian students and detained 1149 minors from the start of this year until the end of October and that two-thirds of the detained children have been physically tortured.

The PPS said that currently, 160 Palestinian minors are held in three Israel prisons.

The Israeli occupation authorities practice various forms of torture against detained children during and after their arrest, in a systematic and widespread manner, which is a grave violation of international law, especially the Convention against Torture and the Convention on the Rights of the Child, said the PPS in its statement.

It said that from the moment of their arrest, children undergo harsh interrogation. They are arrested at night at their homes, beaten in front of their families, handcuffed and blindfolded, kept without food or drink for long hours, subjected to interrogation without the presence of their families, undergo psychological and physical torture, forced to make confessions and sign papers without knowing their content, threatened and intimidated, subjected to interrogation by intelligence officers, and detained in interrogation centers for periods of up to two months.

The Prisoner Society said Israel delay granting families the necessary permits to visit their sons in prisons while many families are deprived of visitation rights.

Occupation authorities also put children in detention centers that lack the minimum standards of humanity, deprive many of them of their right to education and medical treatment, deny them the right to get clothing, personal items, and books, and penalize them at various times and for various reasons.

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